Concept
Double
The figure of a second self — a twin, shadow, reflection or look-alike — studied psychoanalytically by Otto Rank across literature, folklore and belief. Rank read the double as a creation of primitive narcissism: first an assurance against the destruction of the self and the forerunner of the idea of an immortal soul, it later returns as an uncanny persecutor and harbinger of death. Freud took up the motif in his essay on the uncanny.
introduced by
- Otto Rank 1914 Rank's 1914 Imago study made the double a psychoanalytic theme, reading it as a narcissistic defence against death.
developed by
- Sigmund Freud 1919 In Das Unheimliche Freud drew on Rank's study to explain the uncanniness of the double.